Nothing is as susceptible to the sugar-coating of nostalgia as childhood Christmases. If you are ever going to reminisce in the kind of way that makes those around you either dewy-eyed with memories, or violently sick, it is when you start recalling those nights around the blazing fire when the electricity was cut-off, snow lay all around - and Santa still found his way.
My Christmas memories are of the nauseating kind. I grew up in a very small farming village called Park, high on the Co Derry side of the Sperrin mountains. Not exactly the Alps, but when you're seven and it is snowing a lot - and the drifts are higher than you are - Sawel is Everest. And the snow hit us every year without fail: blizzards and snow-drifts and the extra week off school, tractors delivering food to all of us living in the mountains, and the electricity going off, just as it cut out around the rest of the country.
The other things going on in the North passed me by. My parents protected us, and, although they were both very involved in NICRA and the SDLP, we lived in a separate world. Our life was normal. We were unaware that things in Derry were much different to Dublin, which we visited every few weeks. Certainly Derry didn't have the Switzers window, it didn't have Clerys, and you always met your relations every time you went into the city centre, but the serious differences were beyond us.
If I noticed the soldiers, the cordoned-off streets, the security checks as you came and went in shops, the armoured cars on patrol, I did not equate them with anything sinister or dangerous. And I did not cross the border and think Dublin was much different to Derry other than the fact that it was, to me, huge, and all of it seemed lit up at Christmas, not just the city centre but the whole way in from Balbriggan onwards.
Kids notice far less than you think, or perhaps I was an especially dozy child. Whatever the reason, I was well past believing in Santa by the time I had worked out for myself that the North was not entirely like other places. When I did have questions, my parents were there with answers just as they were when the inevitable probings about Santa began.
I think we were protected from the Troubles because we lived over 15 miles from the city, in a small, close, non-sectarian village. Paramilitary leanings were treated with contempt in Park. There were a couple of wide-boys in Dukes of Hazzard type cars with the doors welded closed, but they were as tough as the place got. It was, and is, one of the most pleasant and gentle spots in Ireland.
One of the highlights of next year for me will be returning to my primary school to help with its literacy week. I have such an affection for the place, especially at Christmas when I remember the sale-of-work with its live turkeys, the Christmas parties, sliding down the snow in fertiliser sacks, and Midnight Mass when you met all your friends at the crib and couldn't wait to get home to bed for Santa.
Things have changed a great deal in the 20 years since I was a seven-year-old. There has been an awful lot to protect children from. This Christmas, though, things are different. We really do have stability, and progress that was unimaginable even at the beginning of this decade. The sense of peace, of political congruity, of everyone more-or-less being in this together now is empowering, and exciting.
The North of Ireland has a future that involves protecting kids from falling over in the snow or being frightened in a power-cut or finding out the truth about Santa - an ordinary kind of protection. The kind of things that, 20 years on, you can cover with a nice sugar-coating and offer as your own nostalgic memories of blissful childhood Christmases gone by. A time when anything you dream of is possible - even peace.
Antonia Logue's first novel, Shadow Box, will be published in paperback by Bloomsbury on January 20th